10 must do things for keyword research

Keyword research is the core of any SEO campaign, since the keywords you pick during the research will be included in your website copy, into your PPC campaigns and any other website promotion campaigns. In a sense, keyword research is similar to customer research, because you are studying what words your potential clients use when searching for your service or product.

Here is what you need to do to run a solid keyword research:

• pick valid initial keywords
• use a variety of sources
• search from the point of view of your potential customers
• get the most possible amount of keyphrases
• keep the keywords that will attract the target audience
• pick the small-medium competitive keyword phrases
• research your competitors, and get keywords of their ppc ad campaigns
• spot the topics for your content (site pages, articles, blog posts, press releases, etc)
• use keyword research data
• write website content

Alright, let's go about this in detail.

Pick valid initial keywords

When starting your keyword research, you'll need to pick the main keywords to base your keyword research on. These will be the keywords that you, your customers and your competitors chiefly use when speaking of your service or product. The valid keywords would be synonyms, different in one aspect or another - view them as the directions your website SEO will go. Naturally, you'll need to use quite a variety of sources for your keywords.

Use a variety of sources

To make sure you have the maximum possible coverage for your keywords, you'll want to use any source of customer data you can use. Those would be:

• your own knowledge: you should be aware of at least one word that your service or product can be characterized by
• your own customers: talk to your customers and see if they associate any other words with you
• your competitors: check your competitor's websites for even more keywords

Also, you may want to use other search engine data keyword research tools, such as:

• Google Keyword Suggestion Tool
• WordTracker
• Keyword Discovery
• Overture

Google Keyword suggestion tool can give you keywords, related to your website (if you select the appropriate tab) and offers you a wide selection of phrases real people have typed in.

WordTracker and Keyword Discovery offer free versions of their keyword research tools. They give you a list of keyword phrases with your keyword and also give you some estimation of their popularity. You can purchase a monthly subscription for about $30-50 to get full access to their data.

WordTracker uses the data from the meta search engines and KeywordDiscovery obtains data in another way (undisclosed, so far), so the online tools data can only be used in a relative aspect (to learn which phrases are more or less popular than others and also how competitive they are).

Overture doesn't offer exact results as well, so it can be used only as described above.

Over all the tools, I highly recommend a free version of WordTracker. It offers enough data to sift through (multiply the number of searches by 1.7 to get a rough estimate of daily Google queries). Google External Keyword Tool goes 2nd, as it offers lots of related words and phrases, otherwise unnoticed by other keyword research tools.

Try various points of view

The point is that there is no such a thing as 'an average customer'. You'll need to create content about various aspects of your business to make sure you are noticeable to all types of potential customers, simply because your customers use all possible word combinations to find what they want and you can't predict what they will use to find you.

For instance, your potential clients may be searching for material that will remove any doubt they have before becoming your customer or for some product or service reviews and comparison. Moreover, there may be numerous products and features that may apply to your business - you may want to cover them also.

Get the most keyword phrases

Once done with determining the valid keywords and thinking outside the box, you'll need to build a list of all possible keyword combinations you can think of. It is relatively simple to build a list of keywords yourself, from your customers and competitors, but it may require more time finding the keywords with the help of online tools.

You'll need to keep entering your main keywords and phrases into online keyword suggestion tools to get every possible keyword combination. This will ensure you cover most keywords your potential customers will use.

Keep the target keywords

Obviously, you only need keywords that will drive potential customers to your website. Additional traffic won't hurt, but it won't do you any good either and you'll be spending the extra time and efforts on doing your work for the untargeted keywords.

Basically, a target keyword is a keyword that your potential customers will be using to find you. If you are selling only widgets, you don't need people searching for gadgets and visa versa. That being said, you'll need people searching for 'how to choose a widget', 'how to choose a widget manufacturer', 'the benefits of having a widget', etc.

Pick small or medium competitive keywords

If your site is new, there is no way you can come up for a competitive keyword within a couple of years, so you'll need to target non-competitive keywords. These are usually 3-5 keyword phrases or may be even 2-keyword phrases, if both of the keywords are not competitive.

If you have an old site (over a year or two), you should know which keywords are more or less competitive. You can keep all the keywords to gain more insight what to add to your website.

Research your competitors, and get keywords of their ppc ad campaigns

Using PPCWebSpy or KeywordSpy tools to view what keywords used by your competitors. May be you think this is immoral, but your competitors is using these tools to monitor your keywords of PPC compains in Google.

You should using these absolutely free keyword spy tools, Why not?

Spot the topics for the content

Now the fun begins. By now you should have a huge list of keyword phrases, but you don't know how to apply it to your website or your head hurts when you think of it. Let's start small, then.

First, you'll need to group the keyword phrases by one or two main keywords they have in common. For instance, 'large light widget' and 'large shiny widget' go in one group, while 'small light widget' will go to another group, because we already have two main keywords. The end of this process would be a list of keyword phrases, grouped by common keyword(s).

The groups you divided your keywords denote the topics you should write your content on. See if you can write a topic around a single keyword phrase. If not, seek a complimentary keyword phrase from the keyword group or the whole list, and check again.

Finally, you should arrive at a list of topics that you should write about.

How to use the keyword research data?

Naturally, you'll need to use your keyword research results. The only way you can do that is to create or modify your existing content. You'll be adding your keywords to your page titles, meta tags (they are used to display description snippets in the SERPs), link anchor texts, etc apart from writing website copy.

Writing content after keyword research

One of the ways was briefly outlined before: write content for your website. But how many pages/articles/posts do you need to write? Here your content strategy comes into play. You'd be better off creating fewer pages, but of extreme top quality. This will ensure that natural links from folks that enjoyed it will point to a single place, which will add more weight to a single page, which had been targeted at numerous related keywords, which will ensure that that single page will come up for numerous related phrases in the SERPs.

Of course, you may as well create a page for each of the unique keyword phrase. But bear in mind that should a search engine regard another page for a similar keyword more important, your efforts for creating near-duplicate pages will be disregarded and you won't gain much after a thoroughly conducted keyword research.

Conclusion

The techniques, described above, for conducting a keyword research are viable and have been tested by a professional SEO (at least by someone who works as a SEO for a web and software development company), so it should be a good start for managing your keywords. There may be other advanced keyword research strategies, but you'll only need and find them when you are familiar with the basics of keyword research.

Such a thorough keyword research should be a good asset to the overall website success, so it should be used carefully. Keyword research can't give you substantially different data every time you conduct this, unless you find a radically different avenue for search query data, so you should use the keyword research data (modify your site, write content) cautiously. If not, you'll have to rework what you have done and will lose precious time (and, maybe, reputation) if done improperly.

Keyword Research

Introduction

Keyword & Industry research and the use of targeted keywords can almost be deemed as the most important aspect of any Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Internet Marketing campaign. If your keywords are not targeted and are not attracting the right type of traffic, you will not make sales. Additionally, if the keywords are targeted, but the industry is so competitive that you cannot get decent ad position for under $1.50, and then this is a problem as well. This tutorial is going to cover how to research keywords for an existing campaign, and how to find keywords that will open your eyes to new industries and opportunities.

When we create our keyword lists, we include both highly relevant keywords and keywords that are more broad in nature. By using the more broad keywords with the techniques you will learn in this tutorial you will be able to create highly relevant keywords, and find niche keywords that other advertisers are not aware of.

General Keywords

One of the biggest, and most common, mistakes that someone makes when new to PPC Advertising is bidding too high under very general, low converting keywords. These are keywords such as money, cars, music, and jewelry. General keywords are keywords that are very ambiguous and often times when people search using these keywords, they do not know what they are looking for. More importantly, they are most likely not willing to make a purchase. For example, the keyword “money” could pertain to currency, stocks, real estate, making money, debt, etc. If you are selling an ebook on how to “make money” as an Affiliate Marketer, you could attract a variety of people to your website. Perhaps someone would be looking for information on how to make money by selling on ebay, or how to make money by buying stocks, even how to make money by doing surveys. If you are selling an Internet Marketing Ebook, chances are that you are not going to be able to persuade someone trying to make money buying stocks, to buy your top rated product!

Rule of Thumb: If you cannot target a website specifically to a keyword, then chances are the keyword does not convert very high. Although you can have a great landing page and do a fantastic job pre-selling, how are you going to effectively promote anything under the keyword “money”. If your website focuses on selling Internet Marketing Ebooks, all of your keywords should be highly relevant to this.

What Are the Benefits of Your Products?

If you are selling an Internet Marketing eBook, put yourself in the midset that you are a buyer. What kind of information are you looking for? People who want to buy an Internet Marketing Ebook may be interested in:

• Learning about Internet Marketing
• Learning how to make money working online (at home, on the net, on the internet)
• Selling Products Online
• Learning How Internet Marketing Works
• Increasing Online Sales
• Taking their Business Online
• Driving new Customers to a Busness (online or offline)

When starting a new campaign, it is very important to make a list of “Benefits” that people may be looking for. You can then base your keyword research around these benefits

Choosing The "Right" Keywords

Where should you start when looking for keywords? There is a technique that you can follow when researching keywords within any industry. Ask yourself “If someone was looking to purchase this product/service, what are all the possible keywords and keyword phrase that they could type in?” For example, if someone was looking to purchase Beating Adwords, they could type in the product name “beating adwords” or the relating terms “beatingadwords” or “beatadwords”. If they were looking for make books to teach them how to make money online, they may search for “make money online”, “make money ebook”, “how to make money online”, or “make money on the internet”. They may search for “make money”, but if they want to make a purchase, they will most likely type in something more specific.

There are hundreds of people selling various products under the keyword “make money”, but the fact is that these websites are probably not making much profit, if any at all. If the searcher has no idea about Internet Marketing and wanted to learn more, they might search for “make money”. The search results would provide many ads. Some would say “Learn How to Make Money Online”, or “Make Money on the Internet”. In that case, the searcher would probably do another search for “Make money on the interent” – a more specific search. This is when you want your ads to be displayed, not under the general terms.

People are typically looking for a solution to a problem. This can apply to literally every single industry. How can you take advantage of this? Simple, fulfill their request (their search), and provide them with a solution to their problem.

Here are some keywords that you can append to your keywords to create highly targeted keywords phrases:

cure
resolve
solution
solutions
treatment
relief
resolution
alleviate
relieve
remove
rid
get rid of
detect
detection
repair
fix
delete
symptoms

review
compare
scam
comparison
reviews

instructions
info
information
book
guide
ebook
manual
directions

tips
tip
technique
techniques
secret
secrets

better
stronger
faster
quicker
bigger
smaller

If you were selling an Internet Marketing ebook, you could take general keyword like: Internet Marketing, and create keywords like this.

Internet marketing instructions
Internet marketing info
Internet marketing information
Internet marketing book
Internet marketing guide
Internet marketing ebook
Internet marketing manual
Internet marketing directions

These are highly relevant to what you are selling, and could easily be among the top converting keywords for your internet marketing ebook review site

Customer Demand

What are some products that are in demand? While you could use tools such as Word Tracker and get their free reports of the top 300 searches of the last month, but chances are you will look at the list and not find it beneficial unless you are promoting adult entertainment. You can find what people are looking to buy right now buy using our Keyword Research tool (located in the Research Center) and typing keywords in such as “buy”, “purchase”, “new”, “shop for”, and “order”. These will give you search results of people that are serious consumers and want to get to the point.

Here are some search results that we got from typing in these search terms "Buy", and "Purchase", into the Tool.

auto purchase
best buy
buy
buy a car
buy and sell
buy baby gift
buy book online
buy dvd jessica simpson
buy guitar
buy hydrocodone
buy music
buy new car
buy phentermine
buy stock
buy tramadol
buy used car
buy valium
buy viagra
buy vicodin
buy wholesale
california mortgage purchase
direct buy
home purchase
louisiana purchase
lousiana purchase
new car purchase
point of purchase display
pre purchase inspection
purchase
purchase dinar
purchase domain name
purchase fioricet
purchase house
purchase order
purchase phentermine
purchase proactiv
purchase property
purchase soma
purchase tramadol
purchase viagra

Searches such as “find”, “news”, and “info” are typically performed by people looking for more information on a product. You could use this to your advantage in same way by searching for keyword phrases that include these terms followed by a product or industry

Using Alexa.com

Have you ever found yourself looking at a site and wondering if it is a “hot” new product, or whether it has been around for a while? It is also nice to know if you can take advantage of promoting the product keywords. For example, when browsing the Internet, you come across a site called Wealthy Affiliate. You can typically base a sites quality on how much traffic they receive, depending on how long they have a been around.

http://www.alexa.com

You can determine website’s traffic using www.alexa.com. You simply type in the URL of the website you are trying to find out information about and it will give you traffic statistics on the website. From this data you can determine whether or not a website receives traffic. If you are promoting a product (or thinking about promoting it), and the web page has an Alexa of over 1,000,000 we suggest that you avoid promoting their affiliate program unless the product is BRAND NEW. Chances are this site receives low traffic for a reason.

If a site has a good alexa (under 100,000), chances are there is opportunity to promote the product keywords and receive decent traffic. For example, WealthyAffiliate.com has an Alexa ranking of 12,248 over the last 3 months. This means that WealthyAffiliate.com is 12,248 most popular on the entire Internet. You can safely assume that this site receives traffic through search engines, and some of the time the visitor comes to the site by searching product related keywords. These would be search terms such as:

wealthy affiliate
wealthyaffiliate
wealthy affiliate review
wealthy affiliate member
wealthy affiliate membership
compare wealthy affiliate
does wealthy affiliate work
buy wealthy affiliate
order wealthy affiliate

If you use the overture tool, you will see that the search term “wealthy affiliate” received over 300 searches last month, which means that it gets decent traffic. You can now take advantage by promoting these search terms promoting Wealthy Affiliate as they are not only high traffic and highly relevant, they will convert like crazy.

Merchant website that receive a lot of traffic are popular, and are often gold mines for Affiliates

Finding Keywords Before an Industry/Product

By using keyword tools like inventory.overture.com and the Google Keyword Tool, you will often find the keywords for an industry before you find out whether or not the industry is profitable. This means that you may come across several keyword niches while researching another product. Make sure you take note of these keywords right away. Write them down or you will forget about them. For instance, if you were researching “Wealthy Affiliate”, you may come across a keyword like “Beating Adwords”. Write these kinds of keywords down so that you can come back to them later. Many times, when doing keyword research, you will find many keywords that you would have never thought of.

Once you have a group of keywords for an industry, you need to determine whether the industry is profitable or not. Here are the logical steps that you should take in determining if the industry is profitable or not:

1. Search for Affiliate Programs – If there are not affiliate programs, there is probably no way to make the industry profitable. Type “industry name + affiliate” or “industry name + affiliate program” into Google and you will get the results of related affiliate programs. For instance, you could type in “beating adwords affiliate program”. The top listing will be a link to the Beating Adwords affiliate program information page.
   
   
2. Determine your break-even point and maximum Cost-Per-Click that you can spend on traffic. If you can obtain a hundred clicks for the price of a sale, you can obtain 100% ROI by converting at 1:50 (2% Conversion Ratio). This sort of campaign will typically be profitable. For Instance, if a product pays $45 per sale, and you need to convert at 1:50 to obtain 100% ROI, you cannot spend over $0.45 per click on average to achieve 100% ROI. If the product converts at a higher rate, you can raise your Cost-Per-Click accordingly. Finding the break-even point and maximum CPC will help you determine if you can afford to promote the industry using the keywords you have chosen.
   
   
3. Can you cross-sell products – This may open up doors to a whole new opportunity. If you can collect data (email & name) in the form of an opt-in list, can you promote related products to this person in the future? There are certain industries in which this is not an option, but for the most part there will be opportunity to generate an profitable mailing list.

If you do a lot of research, you will find often times find keywords before the industry. You then have an epiphany, “I wonder if I can make money within this industry, because I can sure get some good keywords cheap”. If you do a full analysis using the steps above you will be able to forecast whether a campaign will be profitable, however you will never be 100% sure until you actually implement it.

Conclusion

Keyword Research is one of the most valuable components involved in becoming a successful Internet Marketer, and although it is very difficult to teach someone how to think, we believe that these keyword research ideas will open new advertising campaigns for most of you. Remember that creative thinking is important to being a successful marketer and it begins with keyword research.

The techniques we've provided you in this tutorial are the same techniques that we use when branching into new markets. Much of our keyword research is done using our keyword research tool, google keyword tool, and our Google Match Types tool to combine keywords and make phrases.